Preface

This thesis is the result of years of dedicated training in the Brazilian art of capoeira,
eighteen months of this time was spent in Brazil, in the heartland of capoeira history and culture,
Salvador de Bahia. During this period I attended book launches, talks, seminars, workshops,
folkloric shows and of course classes and baptizados (capoeira grading ceremonies) where I was lucky
enough to meet and have the chance to converse at length with many of the world's most famous
exponents and noted historians.

Due to the extent of my travels I have trained in several diffent
schools. Whilst in retrospect I would say this is ill-advised for practical training purposes
(though it was unavoidable) it has helped give me a borader overview than most students of my
experience. I am now happily ensconced in the world-wide organisation Cordao De Ouro headed by Mestre
Suassunna and my Mestre is Mestre Poncianinho Almeida. My final decision to dedicate myself to his
teachings was based on an cumulative intellectual, personal and stylistic affinity to just one of the
many possibilities existent in the myriad universe of capoeira.

During these past years I have endeavoured to read and learn from a variety of sources, my last academic year at Kings College
London merely being the most intense period of intellectual research to date. In a study such as the
one to follow, personal affinity must be subjugated to intellectual reasoning and the result of
direct academic research. The wealth of information that I have gleaned, coming as it does from
diverse and often conflicting sources cannot be ignored, however it will be cited with care in the
context of disparate views.

Within the world of capoeira, what seems an extensive schooling on my
part is merely a toe dipped into a sea of meaning. The intellectual studying capoeira as just one
cultural manifestation in a number of vaguely similar examples is denied the benefit of the doting
mestre or conscientious professor and nuances that can only be transmitted mouth to mouth. This
thesis is in part an attempt to bridge that gap by bringing to light the constructs in which
contemporary capoeira apprenticeship is entrenched and showing these to be relative to deeply felt
notions of group building, membership and belonging.
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